Angela Carter's Adèle

Angela Carter was (she died in 1992) an English writer best known for her novels mixing a feminist viewpoint with an atmosphere of magical realism and generous doses of erotism and gothicism. She had a particular interest in classic fairy-tale stories (her works include translations of Charles Perrault, for instance), rewriting some of them in a post-Freudian sort of way in the collection of stories Bloody Chamber (1979). Later, she adapted a couple of those stories for the screen in Neil Jordan's In the Company of Wolfes (1984), a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood in the context of puberty and the awakening of sexual desire.

One of her novels, Nights at the Circus (1984), is on stage right now in the London West End (a review here), and the occasion has motivated the appearance of an article in The Observer written by Susannah Clapp, Angela Carter's literary executor, which explains an interesting story, the reason of this lenghty but we hope interesting introduction:

When, after her death, I went to her house in Clapham and pulled out the drawers of the filing cabinet in which she kept drafts and discards of her work, I hoped to find some unpublished stories, or notes on the novel about Jane Eyre's stepdaughter for which she'd submitted a synopsis: Adele was going to fall in love with a schoolteacher, seduce her own father and watch her mother being guillotined; it was going to play 'some tricks with history ... But then it is a novel'.
No luck with any of that.

Adèle seducing Mr. Rochester sounds shocking indeed, but in Angela Carter's hands we are pretty sure it could have been, at least, fascinating enough. A pity.

Angela Carter's relations with Jane Eyre are not limited to that pretended synopsis. In 1991 she was the author of the Introduction for the Virago Press edition of Jane Eyre.

The paths of Brontëana and Angela Carter cross repeatedly in the best magical realism tradition. Who is the actress that plays the leading role in Nights at the Circus London performances? Natalie Tena who played Bertha Rochester and Catherine Earnshaw in the recent Polly Teale's Brontë.

Categories: In_the_News, Jane_Eyre, Sequels, Charlotte_Brontë